WHAT’S GETTING STARTED NEXT WITH MOBILE: WHAT MARKETERS NEED TO KNOW BY JEFF SMITH AND DOROTHY TSE Mobile matters. Already a powerful presence, it continues to grow. But it is a new medium, and many of the measures brand marketers have come to rely on to guide their investments in other media are not present or not mature in mobile. Marketers must, however, resist the temptation to measure what is easy to measure, and stick with their core principles: focus on measurement they can compare across media and tie to performance, seek agency and media partners with similar philosophies, and rely on proven metrics for determining results. Right now, mobile is hot. Few devices – indeed, few products – have increased their penetration of any market at the kind of speed with which smartphones have proliferated. This ought to be a godsend for brand marketers: a new device on which they can reach consumers practically any time of day, and one adding users by the millions annually in the U.S. alone. Instead, marketers have struggled to find the best way to integrate this evolving technology into their strategies. A key aspect of this quandary is the need to understand the extent to which the mobile medium can VOLUME 1, NO.5 generate brand lift – and ultimately sales lift – with a desired audience, both in absolute terms and compared to investments in other media such as television and online.1 Because of the importance of these measures, marketers should be very cautious about metrics such as click-through rates unique to mobile (or digital) – however granular they may be – that 1 Brand lift quantifies the extent to which advertising has shifted consumer perception, and is a precursor to sales lift. It is best calculated using a concurrent test and control methodology, in which a consumer perception is measured for a group of people who have been exposed to the advertising – the test group – and for a group of people who have not – the control group; the difference is the “lift” that can be attributed to exposure to the advertising. WHAT’S NEXT | GettING staRTED WITH MOBILE ADVERTISING: What MARKETERS NEED TO KnOW CopyrightCopyright © © 2013 2013 The The Nielsen Nielsen Company Company 1 monitor media activity more than business performance, and that cannot be used in cross-media comparisons. They are not viable substitutes for proven ways to measure a media campaign’s effect on one’s brand and business. While mobile advertising spending will surely grow in the near term regardless of how it is measured, only sound, comparable performance metrics will lead marketers to invest in the medium to its full potential, and capitalize on the full opportunity this new medium affords. Only metrics that allow you to compare performance across different media can enable you to determine the combination of spend across those media that will generate the most powerful synergies and produce the best results. In what follows, we look at the explosive growth of mobile media consumption among consumers and discuss how marketers have wrestled with different aspects of the mobile experience. We also look at the evolution of advertising in the medium, focusing specifically on measurement strategies that allow brand marketers to evaluate the degree to which mobile advertising fits their overall mix, and on technical challenges to implementing these strategies. We close with advice for brand marketers on how to move forward today. GROWING LIKE GANGBUSTERS In just four years, the share of smartphones in the US has risen from 18 percent to 62 percent of all mobile phones, driving feature phone share down to just 38 percent. Kudzu aside, you would be hard pressed to identify anything that grew at that speed (Exhibit 1). Because the total number of phones increased enormously, the absolute growth rate of smartphones has been even higher. WHAT’S NEXT | THE NEXT STEP FORwaRD IN AD EFFECTIVENESS WHAT’S NEXT | GettING staRTED WITH MOBILE: What MARKETERS NEED TO KnOW 2 UPWARDLY MOBILE: THE RAPID EVOLUTION OF MOBILE MEDIA EXHIBIT 1 U.S. SMARTPHONE PENETRATION, Q3, 2009 – Q2, 2013 70% 62% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 18% 10% 0 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 Source: Nielsen Mobile Insights Survey data Unfortunately, what should have been a gift to brand marketers (imagine if TV had spread at such a rate in the 1950s) has not been nearly so straightforward. Indeed, the story of marketers and smartphones is like the story of Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass: you have to run faster and faster just to stay in place. Brand marketers were not even the first to step into the new medium. Direct response marketers were quicker to take advantage of this burgeoning opportunity, inviting consumers to click on offers that provided immediate gratification – for example, a free music download or a coupon for coffee. They could connect their advertising with sales – something brand marketers have found much more challenging, as we discuss below. Copyright © 2013 The Nielsen Company 3 Many believe direct response will ultimately dominate this medium. It offers a real reward for just one click, and can offer it in a location- relevant context, while the consumer is out near or in stores. But there are limits to the use of coupons. Consider the auto companies, who are big advertisers. Given the price of a new car, dealerships aren’t going to serve up mobile coupons and expect people walking by to pick up an SUV or new sedan. Nor can coupons help brand marketers guide consumers down the classic purchase funnel, first by creating awareness of their EXHIBIT 2 products, then by fostering and shaping favorable attitudes, and finally by driving purchase intent and preference (Exhibit 2). Nevertheless, as AWARENESS consumers flock to mobile devices, brand managers cannot afford to be absent from this screen, or ineffective on it. ATTITUDES FAVORABILITY That said, the question of what exactly “this screen” represents for INTENT advertisers is one reason mobile is challenging. The answer has been PREFERENCE changing quickly. Brand marketers’ first answer was that smartphones had web-browsing capabilities, so mobile advertising must be like online advertising. However, it quickly became apparent that transferring browser advertising to the mobile web was clumsy. What worked on a large screen did not work well on a small one. The response was to take the existing browser AWARENESS advertising and optimize it for phone screens. But people generally turn to their mobile browsers only to glean information quickly, and by treating ATTITUDES mobile phones as if they were small PCs, advertisers missed the particular FAVORABILITY situation of mobile users on the move. INTENT PREFERENCE As brand marketers struggled to find a good solution, they were hit with the creation and explosive growth of a new phenomenon – apps. Even as mobile web use climbed into the stratosphere, apps climbed much higher. Between July 2011 and July 2012, mobile web users grew at 82 percent, from 52.4 million to 95.2 million – but mobile app users grew 85 percent, from 55.0 million to 101.8 million.2 Further, by the beginning of 2013, people were spending over 80 percent of their mobile time using apps. Anyone limiting themselves to an in-browser mobile advertising model is finding its customers for just a fraction of their mobile-screen time.3 Of course, in change lies opportunity. Mobile apps can be customized to support much richer ad formats more seamlessly integrated with the consumer’s experience. This opened up new possibilities for brand marketers to engage their audience in a manner most appropriate to the WHAT’S NEXT | THE NEXT STEP FORwaRD IN AD EFFECTIVENESS branding experience: through a video game that promotes the marketer’s key messages, or by sharing a user-generated video that becomes an element of the marketer’s campaign, and so on. 2 “State of the Media: The Social Media Report,” Nielsen, 2012. 3 “A Look Across Screens, The Cross-Platform Report,” Nielsen, June 2013. WHAT’S NEXT | GettING staRTED WITH MOBILE: What MARKETERS NEED TO KnOW 4 These types of opportunities to engage have in fact helped bolster brand marketers’ creativity, and there is a great deal of buzz around mobile marketing. At any conference that includes “mobile” in its title, you are likely to find a room overflowing with brand marketers hoping to glean insight. But are the dollars keeping pace with the hype? THE MOBILE OPPORTUNITY It is often suggested that advertising spend should track time spent on a medium. If this holds for mobile, there appears to be a $12 billion dollar annual opportunity for mobile just in the U.S. Mobile claims 12 percent of people’s time, but the $4 billion dollars spent on the medium represent just 3 percent of total advertising spend on print, radio, TV, Internet and mobile.4 While some of this gap can be explained by the medium’s infancy, there is potentially another reason for the fact that mobile advertising lags the phenomenal growth of mobile use. Many years ago, Arthur Nielsen noted that “an unmeasured medium is an inherently undervalued medium.” Until a reliable, broadly accepted, independent source of measurement arrives that leverages metrics consistent with those used to measure advertising in other media, marketers will not fully commit to mobile. There is plenty of evidence that the absence of a trusted and broadly accepted metric significantly impedes the growth of advertising spend. When, in 1995, a consortium of advertisers and publishers established Postar to develop a standard measurement for United Kingdom outdoor advertising, ad revenue growth doubled.5 When we ourselves introduced Cinema Audience Measurement in 2003, replacing self-reported attendance numbers by theater, advertising revenues grew by 47 percent in 2003 and 35 percent in 2004.6 Marketers need robust, accepted, independent measurement standards comparable to those they use for other media and that speak to ROI, or they will not be able to factor mobile advertising properly into the marketing mix models crucial to how they allocate their marketing investment.